Foot and mouth laboratory branded 'visibly substandard'

Tuesday 11 March 2008 13.22 EDT
First published on Tuesday 11 March 2008 13.22 EDT

The animal health laboratory behind last summer's outbreak of foot and mouth disease is housed in "visibly substandard" buildings and poorly managed and regulated, an independent inquiry into the outbreak said today.

The Cabinet Office-commissioned report by Dr Iain Anderson, who led an inquiry into the far bigger 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth, blamed a catalogue of factors for the leak from the laboratory.

"This virus should never have got out. Everything was wrong around the Pirbright; the regulatory system was poor, the risk management was poor," it said.

Livestock on eight farms in the Surrey area were infected with foot and mouth from August last year.

Reports found the leak most likely hailed from the facility in Pirbright, Surrey, which was used by both the government's Institute of Animal Health (IAH) and Merial Animal Health, a private vaccine company.

A live virus being used to develop a vaccine had probably leaked from faulty pipes and spread from the site, the reports said. The leak led to the culling of hundreds of healthy animals and an export ban on British livestock. The last international restrictions were rescinded on February 22.

Today's report said a "creeping degradation of standards" at the Pirbright site must never be allowed again.

"The IAH is critical to the nation's capacity to prepare for, and respond to, the evolving animal disease," it said. "However, the facilities of IAH fall well short of internationally recognised standards. And the governance and funding arrangements are muddled and ineffective," it said.

The report noted that there had been "many warning signs that all was not well at Pirbright".

It added: "Some of the buildings and facilities at Pirbright are visibly substandard."

Anderson also described the laboratories as a "shabby and dilapidated".

Anderson however praised the "strong leadership" seen in tackling the crisis, from the prime minister downwards, contrasting to the official "dithering" seen in 2001.

Overall, when the handling of the outbreak was taken into account, "the positive easily outweighs the negative", he said.

Anderson said there needed to be greater clarity of ownership and responsibility for the shared laboratory site, calling for a reorganisation of the institute.

"Looking across all the evidence we sifted and the analyses we made, I have become convinced of the need to reposition IAH as a new National Institute of Infectious Diseases supported by multiple sources of funding from government and elsewhere."

Anderson added: "The events of last summer brought home that the old arrangements at Pirbright must now be discarded."